


we'd never buy a cuckoo clock.

by owlvsdove



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 19:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5978059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlvsdove/pseuds/owlvsdove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“No one else is dancing, James,” she calls. </p>
<p>Freddie’s already two paces deep into the crowd, his imagined dance floor, when he has to turn on his heel frantically and convince her some more. </p>
<p>“So let’s start a revolution, you and me.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	we'd never buy a cuckoo clock.

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't watched series 2 yet because i'm terrified of what i'll find there but here are some little things i came up with

 

 

“Dance with me, dear,” he declares, two gins in. She’s leaning against the bar between Lix and Hector, minding her own bloody business while they argue over coverage of Egypt.

“No one else is dancing, James,” she calls.

Freddie’s already two paces deep into the crowd, his imagined dancefloor, when he has to turn on his heel frantically and convince her some more.

“So let’s start a revolution, you and me.” He’s all at once a little too close to her face. Gin, aftershave, more gin. And desire. “Everyone needs someone to follow. I’ll follow you, they’ll follow us.”

Hector and Lix have stopped to watch the spectacle that is the two of them together.

She takes his offered hand. She knows, she knows so clearly, that she is the one following him.

 

 

 

There is a night, late into their flirtation but early into the heart of their relationship, when the pair of them get viciously drunk with Lix and a whole crew from the newsreel office and decide to get married.

“I’d be a good husband!” Freddie declares.

Bel lets out a lively snort.

“You disagree?”

“Please, Freddie! You’d be awful. You’d spend all of your time chasing stories, getting into trouble, calling women up late into the night.” That last one had been a secret between the two of them, now loose to the entire office, and she pinks slightly under the low lights.

“Not if I had a lovely wife, I wouldn’t,” he argues.

“Why don’t you prove it,” Lix goads. “Find a girl stupid enough to settle down with you.”

“Hey, stupid,” he turns to Bel. “D’you wanna?”

“What a proposal.” She takes a long pull from her drink.

“Are you scared?”

She’s offended, spluttering. “Of course I’m not scared!”

“I just can’t think of a logical reason why you wouldn’t want to marry me other than fear of commitment. I’m a catch.”

“Perhaps the ideal that I shouldn’t need to marry to be a good woman?”

“You will always be a good woman, Moneypenny, but sometimes settling down is good for the soul.”

“My soul’s just fine, thanks.”

He turns to Lix. “That’s the fear talking.”

“Fine!” she hears herself shout.

He turns to her, eyes big.

“Fine,” she repeats. “I’ll marry you.”

“You can’t be with anyone else, though!” he challenges. “No affairs for the Missus!”

“You either,” she insists.

“I wouldn’t mind being your kept man.”

She coughs into her glass.

The others leave to dance or get more drinks or to love each other or themselves, and eventually Bel and Freddie are left on their own.

“I’d be good to you, you know,” he says softly. That little meaningful way he always talks when he’s letting her know something important. “I’d be a good husband.”

“I know, Freddie.”

“Truly,” he says. “I wouldn’t make you do anything wifely. Cleaning or cooking or anything. I wouldn’t—we’d be partners, Bel.”

“Then we’d be very happy together, I think,” she says, just hardly above a tender whisper.

“Ecstatic,” he assures her.

They’re a lot more careful with each other, after that.  

 

 

 

“May I come over please?” He says it in a rush.

She rubs her forehead, squinting into the kitchen light. “It’s one in the morning, Freddie.”

“Is that a no?”

She pauses. Sighs. “No, it’s not. Come on, then.”

“Five minutes,” he says, and he almost hangs up, but she stops him.

“You know, I’m glad you still bother to ask. I’m afraid one day you might turn up unexpectedly and find me indecent.”

She can hear him grinning down the line. “I could never, Moneypenny.”

 

 

 

Every once in a while, she and Freddie walk out of work at the same time, walk along the same path, and she finds herself at his threshold, through his front hall, into the living room with her kittens kicked off and her feet tucked under her on the sofa.

Mr. Lyon is poorly, but he always remembers her name and never raises his voice. Bel and Freddie trade barbs about whatever god-awful program is on the telly and Freddie’s father just sits quietly, hums a bit, eats his pie.

And on one of these occasions, Bel never seeks an opportunity to leave and Freddie never asks her to. She hovers quietly, as Freddie gets his father into bed, helps him tidy the kitchen. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t leave.

Or perhaps some quiet part of her does.

Regardless, she follows him into his bedroom, light of his bedside lamp coloring everything amber. He almost ignores her, possibly too frightened to say anything that might spook her away. She lays down on his bed, against the wall, just a sliver on his worn quilt, just a shadow of a person, observing something private. He’s so beautiful in his undershirt. She doesn’t much want to sleep in her garters but she doesn’t much want to leave, either.

When he finally lays his tired shoulders down on the mattress, she places a hand flat on his chest, rubs her thumb in sweet circles until he sighs with relief.

She wakes before dawn and flees.

 

 

 

All in all, Bel’s quite done with the “exceptional man” prototype, the one with roguish charm who can get away with anything, the one plastered on television and at the cinema and poorly mimicked in reality by mediocre little boys in their fathers’ suits.

But she must admit that Freddie is exceptional.

True, Freddie is just a little boy in his father’s suit, threadbare and patched like an ersatz professor. And his charm isn’t roguish or fake. He can’t be copied; he is an unrepeatable event.

And all of this she thinks with his hand at the small of her back, just a breath of space between the two of them as they spin around the room.

“You are exceptional, Fredrick,” her lips say.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Isabel.” Then he pauses. “Why do you say?”

She doesn’t have a comfortable answer. “Because it’s true.”

He almost frowns, brow flinching into the smallest confusion.

She leans forward to pull him just a bit closer, resting her chin on his shoulder so he can’t see her face.

“I’m just quite fond of you, Freddie.”

She can practically hearing him smiling. “I’m quite fond of you, too, Moneypenny.”

 

 

 

“Oh, god, James,” she groans, head down on her desk.

He shuts her office door.

“This show is rubbish, isn’t it?” Bel continues.

He ponders. “No.” He rethinks. “Yes.”

She looks up at him with the saddest look she can manage.

“Yes,” he repeats. “But it’s our rubbish.”

 

 

 

Bel’s father dies the morning of that week’s live broadcast of _The Hour_ , but she doesn’t find out until the afternoon. Sissy’s meant to be in with final copy ages ago, but instead she’s on the phone looking terrified. Freddie’s talking a mile a minute about some story that still three week’s from being ready for air, so she drifts off, watching Sissy hang up the phone, steel herself, and walk into Bel’s office.

“What’s wrong?” Bel asks, interrupting Freddie.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Rowley,” Sissy says. “But I’ve just been informed that your father has passed away.”

All she can manage is a quiet noise of disbelief before Freddie’s leapt to his feet, urging Miss Cooper to go back to her desk and not to breathe a word of it to anyone. He shuts the door quietly and moves to twist the blinds closed. For a minute, she can’t for the life of her figure out why, and then she realizes. He knows her. It’s in case she wants to cry. She wouldn’t want anyone else to see her cry.

Bel slips out of her chair, down the floor behind her desk, and Freddie doesn’t hesitate to crawl down there with her.

“I still want to do the show,” she murmurs.

“You don’t have to, Bel.”

“It’s my show,” is all she can say. “We’ll leave right after.”

Because it’s not even a question. She’ll drive the two of them out to the country, and he’ll stay the weekend in her old, empty house with her while she falls apart. That’s just who he is. The person she always wants by her side.

“Okay,” he says.

She lowers herself down to the floor and rests her head on his thigh, lets her tears soak into his pant leg until show time.

 

 

 

“Bel.”

“Do you only know how to use a telephone after midnight?”

“I just wanted to tell you that I borrowed your scarf to masquerade as a lady to avoid my MI6 tail.”

“…Alright.”

“And now I’m keeping it as a centerpiece for my shrine to you.”

“…Very well.”

“Can you come over tomorrow night and sit with my dad while I follow a lead?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s get married and flee the country.”

“Okay.”

 

 

 

She’s not sure exactly what he’s trying to pull. She supposes all the cloak-and-dagger mystery is his signature, but it’s amusing to see him try to hide it. She knows it’s from him right away.

“Something peculiar happened today,” she says after he saunters into her office that evening, hands in pockets.

“Is that so?” he asks.

“I was going through a stack of mail and I found a poem addressed to me.”

“A poem?” he plays along. “From who?”

“It wasn’t signed.”

“What about the handwriting?”

“It had been typed.”

“Curious,” he says.

“Quite.”

“And what did you think of it?”

“Hmm?”

“The poem. What did you think of it?”

“The writing?”

“Yes,” he says impatiently.

“Truthfully, I thought it was a bit much.” Lie. “Not a very sophisticated use of language. Rather pedestrian.” Lie, lie, lie. Actually, it had made her shiver.

All of his play-acting drops right off his face. “What?”

“Seemed like a knockoff. Sweet, though, I suppose.”

“ _Pedestrian_ ,” he repeats in disgust. “How could you possibly—”

He catches the grin on her face.

“You’re heartless.”

“I knew it was from you the second I read it,” she says.

“Did you?”

“Of course. I know your voice almost as well as I know my own.”

And that’s the crux of it. She’s come to know him as well as she knows herself. And he’d even said so: _You are everywhere my eyes go/in everything my fingers touch._

“So what did you really think of it, then?”

She can’t tell him that. She can tell him everything but she can’t tell him that.

“A bit pedestrian,” she repeats.

“Be serious.”

“I hate when you’re a better writer than me.”

“Bel, please.”

“I loved it.” It stutters out of her like a colt out of the gate. “I loved it.”

_It undressed me, it unraveled me._ It ended her and started her anew. “I love you.”

For a second, she’s not sure where the voice comes from that says it. But it’s her. It’s unmistakably her voice and it’s unmistakably her heart, showing its hand, baring all. And if she still wasn’t sure, she’d know by Freddie’s face. Enraptured, and genuinely terrified.

She understands the feeling.

“I love you,” she says again.

She has to lean extra heavily on him as they walk home that night.

 


End file.
